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Saturday, May 18, 2013

Fun Gardening Tips & Tricks

Things have been crazy busy around here & time seems to fly by, but I have come to the solution - I just need to clone myself, 3 times in order to get everything done - it can't be that hard right ;)

My husband farms on a big scale to feed the world, I farm (garden) to feed my family. With in the last week our new tractor has shown up, finally, the Quonset is full of seed bags begging to be planted, my husband is itching to get into the field, I am itching to get in my garden & I haven't been home one single night in the past two weeks. Like I said crazy busy!

Well today I FINALLY got my gardens planted and I was over joyed! I say gardens because I always do an in-ground garden & raised bed gardens, but this year I also decided to try some container gardening. This week was suppose to rain kinda all week & be cooler (in the high 50's to 60's), which in my mind is perfect gardening weather, not too hot, not too cold. I truly love and crave vegetables & fruit but don't enjoy the dent they put in my pocket book. When I grew up we had a huge garden that seemed to go on for miles & miles (especially because I was in charge of weeding it) and I have always had a garden since then. Also I went to school for horticulture, but so many things have changed since I went to school. I have been reading & seeing all these posts about cool gardening tips that people have pinned on Pinterest & So I thought I wanted to give some of them a try & test them out. First off one of the things I DID know was that tomato plants will grow the roots all the way up their stems if you allow them to since tomato plants get so top heavy I usually plant my tomato plants on their sides to make sure to they grow more roots to help anchor them in better.

But one things I never knew (or if I did don't remember anymore) is that if you put a Tbsp of Epsom salt into the bottom of each hole of you tomato & pepper plants that is acts as a wonderful fertilizer & is suppose to get you 3 times as much food on each plant, so I wanted to test out that theory.

I like to enjoy a glass of wine or two at night to relax & unwind from the day, so I happen an abundance of corks around so i thought I would use those as my garden markers. Cute right? And it's reusing items I already have which is always a plus.

This one sounded a bit strange, but did make complete sense when I thought about it - Diapering your soil. Yep that's right you use a diaper in your container pots. What it does is help release the moisture as needed to your plants. So in my container plants I decided to give this a try & see if it made any noticeable difference from my container tomato & pepper plants than my in-ground plants. I DO NOT recommend doing the diaper theory for an in-ground or raised bed garden!

Speaking of reusing items - why not reuse your garbage to help your container plants? I have used the old 4 pack containers that your plants come in (or the larger containers), plastic egg easter egg shells, plastic bags, or even the old soil bags for real large pots. Some other items that work are pine cones or twigs & leave matter. All you have to do is put your "garbage" of choice in the bottom of your CONTAINER making sure not to smother the drainage hole & then cover with the soil of your choice & plant your plants. This makes the container lighter & will help your drainage.

I always soak my seeds over night in warm water to help the germination time.

I also want to put together a potato tower, but have yet to do that.I will make sure to keep you updated through out the growing season so make sure to check back to see how things progress. If anyone has any other cool tricks or tips for gardening, please share that is how we all learn!